At The Eleventh Hour

They were strange words to be uttered, as they were, by a pale, haggard,
half-starved looking young fellow in a dingy, comfortless room on the
top floor of a South London tenement-house; and yet there was a
triumphant ring in his voice, and a clear, bright flush on his thin
cheeks that spoke at least for his own absolute belief in their truth.

Let us see how far he was justified in that belief.

To begin at the beginning, Richard Arnold was one of those men whom the
world is wont to call dreamers and enthusiasts before they succeed, and
heaven-born geniuses and benefactors of humanity afterwards.

He was twenty-six, and for nearly six years past he had devoted himself,
soul and body, to a single idea--to the so far unsolved problem of
aerial navigation.

This idea had haunted him ever since he had been able to think logically
at all--first dimly at school, and then more clearly at college, where
he had carried everything before him in mathematics and natural science,
until it had at last become a ruling passion that crowded everything
else out of his life, and made him, commercially speaking, that most
useless of social units--a one-idea'd man, whose idea could not be put
into working form.

He was an orphan, with hardly a blood relation in the world. He had
started with plenty of friends, mostly made at college, who thought he
had a brilliant future before him, and therefore looked upon him as a
man whom it might be useful to know.

We have hundreds more books for your enjoyment. Read them all!

But as time went on, and no results came, these dropped off, and he got
to be looked upon as an amiable lunatic, who was wasting his great
talents and what money he had on impracticable fancies, when he might
have been earning a handsome income if he had stuck to the beaten track,
and gone in for practical work.

The distinctions that he had won at college, and the reputation he had
gained as a wonderfully clever chemist and mechanician, had led to
several offers of excellent positions in great engineering firms; but to
the surprise and disgust of his friends he had declined them all. No one
knew why, for he had kept his secret with the almost passionate jealousy
of the true enthusiast, and so his refusals were put down to sheer
foolishness, and he became numbered with the geniuses who are failures
because they are not practical.

When he came of age he had inherited a couple of thousand pounds, which
had been left in trust to him by his father. Had it not been for that
two thousand pounds he would have been forced to employ his knowledge
and his talents conventionally, and would probably have made a fortune.
But it was just enough to relieve him from the necessity of earning his
living for the time being, and to make it possible for him to devote
himself entirely to the realisation of his life-dream--at any rate
until the money was gone.